It's no surprise that your dog can learn to sit when you say "sit" and come when called. But a study appearing March 22 in the journal Current Biology has made the unexpected discovery that dogs generally also know that certain words "stand for" certain objects. When dogs hear those words, brain activity recordings suggest they activate a matching mental representation in their minds.
"Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words," says Marianna Boros of the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, one of the paper's co-first authors. "They also don't just associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without really understanding the meaning of those words, but they activate a memory of an object when they hear its name."
Shoutout to the maned wolf, which is technically neither wolf nor fox but has its own genus called Chrysocyon! Why -
why are your legs so long?
I mean, intellectually, I understand that it’s because you live in grasslands and have evolved to be able to see over the grass, but emotionally… why? Are they?? Like that??? Surely there was a way to make your body more cohesive and proportional-looking?
Dog pile! An illustration for a thank you card destined for a friend of the family who does some work with rescues :-) Woof!
[ID: an Illustration of many different dogs of various patterns and body shapes, in sienna, gold, charcoal, and white. Some have collars or accessories in blue or red, and most are facing forward and drawn from the shoulders up. End.]